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Taking a View from Above

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In March 2025, I practiced a wonderful philosophical exercise called the “View from Above”. It consists in using reason and imagination to picture human affairs as seen from a great height, such as, for instance, picturing the Earth and its inhabitants from the point of view of the Moon. As Pierre Hadot says, it is an “extraordinarily rich tradition” 1 and you can only hope to touch on a “few aspects” of it in a brief text, such as this blog post. His study “The View from Above” 2 is an excellent primer on this topic. I cannot hope to do the topic as much justice as he did, but I am very excited to tell you a bit about this, to hopefully kindle your curiosity. How to practice the View from Above: From time to time, take a moment to consider something you are familiar with from a different point of view: a bird’s-eye view. For example, think about the places you frequent as they would be seen from the sky, or the region you live in as it would be seen from the Moon. From this...
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Spinoza, but without skipping demonstrations

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In February 2025, I devoted my spiritual life to an experiment that was long overdue: reading the Ethics of Spinoza without skipping its very dry & demanding demonstrations. I call it overdue because, for years, I have tried to internalize Spinoza’s philosophy, and finally, my experiment of March 2024 with “spinozist mindfulness” forced me to confront the fact that this could not be done fully without actually taking the plunge into spinozist logic. This new experiment gave me a new fervent appreciation of the paradigmatic spinozist philosophical exercise: reasoning in geometrical order. Last time I talked about practising Spinoza’s philosophy on this blog, I was trying to figure out what the paradigmatic spinozist philosophical exercise would be, and if it could be a form of mindfulness meditation . This reflection culminated in the following conclusion/confession: the “geometrical order” that Spinoza claims as a method, and which consists ...
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Fighting anxiety like my life depends on it

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TLDR: The struggle is real. In January 2025, during a vacation from work, I focused on a few philosophical exercises that decreased my anxiety to an astonishing degree. I recommend them wholeheartedly. However, in spite of keeping up those habits in February, going back to work immediately re-ignited my bad anxious habits… I would say to an equally astonishing degree! This forced me to wonder why these philosophical exercises did not rescue me in this new context and to reckon with the depth of my anxiety disorder – its intensity, pervasiveness, and origin. I share all the philosophical insights I can muster. Anxiety is what happens when you sense that you are in a situation of “problematic uncertainty” 1 . You feel that you lack information in a way that leaves you vulnerable to a potential threat. The French have this wonderful idiom that literally translate as “I do not know what sauce I am going to be eaten with” 2 . It means that we do not know what to expect exactly (though ...
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